did my menu sidebar get site client penalized?

i had a client get pretty hard by penguin from #2 to #50 now he's at #30

the only thing I had even done to this website since getting it about two months back was try to improve the user experience by adding a side menu linking to all of the internal service pages on the site and this side menu appears in the sidebar of nearly every page on the site. I did this using what I guess could be considered exact match anchors.

Have I been penalized for accidently over optimizing the site with internal links/anchor text?

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